Freescale delivers automotive MCU for 'green' engine design

Austin, Tex.  Freescale Semiconductor says it has introduced the industry's most powerful and sophisticated microcontroller (MCU) for engine control in mainstream, high-volume automobiles. The MPC5674F is the latest addition to the company's growing portfolio of 32-bit automotive MCUs built on the Power Architecture technology.

The MPC5674F addresses the automotive industry's need for precise control of engine events, enabling developers to optimize combustion and tune engines for improved fuel efficiency and cleaner emissions, without sacrificing performance. Manufactured on 90-nanometer technology, the MPC5674F is said to outpace other powertrain MCUs with its 264-MHz clock speed. This fast performance allows the core to execute more than 600 million Dhrystone instructions per second (DMIPS)  about 10 times the performance level of today's conventional engine controllers, said Freescale.

While HEV production is accelerating, hybrids still represent a small percentage of new car production and sales. Leading automakers continue to enhance the fuel efficiency of conventional gasoline and diesel engines used in mainstream vehicles by optimizing engine control systems. The MPC5674F MCU provides powertrain engineers with high-performance technology designed to reduce the cost and complexity of next-generation green engine designs including HEV systems, said Freescale.

With its 264-MHz core and 600+ DMIPS performance, the MPC5674F offers the processing power to meet the computational challenges of diesel engine designs. The device's 64-channel dual enhanced timing units with 30K dedicated RAM is designed to handle complex engine timing events.

In addition, with the 32-bit core, 64-channel dual timing units, quad ADCs (an industry first for powertrain MCUs), on-chip digital signal processing and 256K data RAM, the MPC5674F also offers the performance and functionality to handle complex filtering and calculations for various methods of knock detection. The device's high level of integration enables engine designers to implement virtual sensors and avoid using separate knock detection ASICs, which reduces system cost.

The MPC5647F helps automotive developers meet government-mandated emissions standards by providing 4MB of flash, which is one of the largest flash arrays available in the powertrain MCU market. This on-chip flash provides ample non-volatile memory to support computationally intensive modeling environments and auto code generation, without the cost and complexity of adding off-chip memory.

The MPC5674F is backed by extensive hardware and software development tools optimized for automotive MCUs built on Power Architecture technology.